Essentially, the answer to this question relies on various assumptions about how the ancient Roman economy worked. As is to be expected, this is a hugely controversial field since we have very little by way of economic documents surviving from Roman times (the Egyptian papyri provide an exception), the literary sources we use for studying Roman society in general emanate from a small, highly educated elite that actively disdained commerce and manufacturing and the archaeological record, though very extensive and quite illuminating, is still patchy. Historians of the ancient Roman economy tend to divide into two camps - the primitivists and the modernists.

Primitivists argue that the Roman economy functioned in a profoundly different way to modern economies. They argue that market forces like supply and demand had no role in how it worked, economic activity instead being driven by a distributive logic (i.e. the shipping of North African grain to provide the grain dole in Rome) and by culturally embedded notions of status i.e. the ownership of country estates for Roman senators was not a capital investment from which profits could be obtained but rather a means of displaying their elite status. They also argue that the economy was heavily rigged towards the interests of the state, landowners and high status urban dwellers, who they view as essentially parasitic forces, with everyone else being at loss. The key text for this view is Moses Finley's "The Ancient Economy" (1973), still the only comprehensive survey on the Classical Greek and Roman economies from the Bronze Age Collapse to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire to date - Finley himself was heavily influenced by the ideas of the sociologists Max Weber and Karl Polanyi.

Modernists argue that the ancient Roman economy, whilst much less technologically advanced than our own and with very different social and political institutions, was still governed by a market logic like our own and that its networks of production, distribution and exchange benefited everyone, not just a small parasitic elite.

Historians influenced by the primitivist view argue that the Fall of the Western Roman Empire had a neutral to positive effect on ordinary people. The idea that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a relief for provincials and peasants is very clearly there in Neil Faulkner's "The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain" (2001), who sees the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain in the 5th century as a liberating experience for the Romano-British from what he sees as a highly parasitic imperial system. Others see continuity - for example, Pierre Bonnassie in "From Slavery to Feudalism and South-Western Europe" (1977) and Guy Bois in "The Transformation of the Year 1000" (1991) see ancient slavery, parasitic towns and a static rural economy as enduring long past the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, indeed up until late 10th and early 11th centuries when the "feudal revolution" at last happens , slavery disappears and economic growth and a more symbiotic relationship between town and country kick in.

Those influenced by the modernist view see the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as a disaster for everyone from aristocrats to peasants, constituting in effect the collapse of a of a trans-national market economy and a return to early Iron Age standards of living The key text for this is Bryan Ward Perkins' "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation" (2005), a very lively and fun read that provides a great introduction to the historiography as well as to late Roman and post-Roman archaeology. A more mild take is provided by Chris Wickham in "The Inheritance of Rome: 400 - 1000" (2009) - Wickham incorporates the insights of Bryan Ward Perkins et al, but like Faulkner he's a Marxist though a much less extreme one - and I'd highly recommend reading him too. To exemplify what their theories involve - basically, whilst a peasant in lowland Britain or Northern Italy in 300 AD might have graced his table with fine table wares from manufacturing plants in the South of France, Oxfordshire or the Bay of Naples which produced ceramics to the highest standard on an industrial scale (reflected by their huge rubbish dumps for finished wares that were substandard), stored their wine and olive oil in North African Amphorae, lived in well-insulated stone houses with tiled roofs and had ready access to coin, their counterparts in 600 AD would have to make do with crude home-backed pottery, live in drafty wooden houses whose thatched roofs had to be replaced every couple of years and would have barely any access to coin with which to buy consumer goods at all. This is what Bryan Ward Perkins calls "a return to prehistory", and Chris Wickham more prosaically calls "the radical simplification of material culture." That being said, Wickham does argue that in the transition to the post-Roman kingdoms, peasants might have become slightly better off in certain ways in that, while their material living standards declined, their legal standing improved a bit and they no longer had to face up to the taxman.